Tempus Fugit
by Manon-de
Summary: There is space to explore and adventures to have, a whole lifetime to live for herself and herself alone- and there is Rory, there will always be Rory. But for this moment, he will have to wait. Amy Pond-centric.


I think the scenes from the end of The Eleventh Hour and the beginning of The Beast Below will always be some of my favorite DW moments- Amy exploring the TARDIS, floating in space, starting her adventure- it always makes me happy and sentimental. No pairings here, just some musings.

* * *

She has always been- will always be- the mad, bad, beautiful Amy Pond. She just didn't realize it until this moment.

(And she will not, for many moments to come- but time in the TARDIS is flexible like that and into her mind jumps things that she has never thought of before, yet know are true. She is mad and bad and beautiful, the Impossible Girl, and she knows it and, at the same time, doesn't yet. _He_ would call it a paradox.)

He happens to be holding her ankle right now, fingertips pressing into just beneath the delicate bone above her heel (the fibula, Rory would say) and the gentle tickle of his sleeve just below that. The jacket is tweed, the same color as his hair, and both are silly and foppish, too old to be on the face of someone so young. Yet, she gets the feeling that he isn't really that young at all. And he is nothing like what she imagined an alien would look like.

Space, as it turns out, isn't either. It isn't black and cold, a sucking vortex that retreats on toward infinity- well, it is, but before that, in the immediate space of her exploratory eyesight, it is wondrous. Color and light, clouds smeared against the backdrop like spilled milk or dampened flour, impossibly beautiful against the play of nebulas and stars like pinpricks of light, holes poked into the cloth with a flashlight shining through them. Sitting in the garden that night all those years ago, contemplating the stars, she had never thought that space could be so, well- spacious. The _world_ was what was big, or rather, the parts of it that she thought she would never be able to see. The night sky up ahead had always seemed so black, so small, so limiting. It's only now, floating billions of miles above the earth, beyond the galaxy, her hair in a red halo around her head, in her _nightie_ no less- it's only now she realizes her eyes simply weren't big enough to see it.

Even now she doesn't think she'll ever be able to see it all, to take it all in. Right now there is joy bubbling up inside of her, incredulous and light at the thought of her current position, right now she is smiling, but in a minute, she well knows she could be crying. Overwhelming is a plaintive word in the stark face of the universe.

Below, his fingers tug at her and his sleeve itches- _Come along, Pond_- but she comes out of her reverie, instead, at the thought of Rory. Rory and their wedding, Rory and their life together, Rory probably getting sloshed and dancing embarrassingly at his stag party in downtown Leadworth. Running away with a mysterious stranger had not been plan for the night before her wedding (she almost chokes on the word, _mysterious,_ because with that tweed jacket and those suspenders and that _bow tie_ how could he possibly be mysterious?). But she had stood there in her garden, a Scottish misfit in an English village, and contemplated the thought of this man sailing out her life once more, the third time she would have watched him evaporate like smoke, and she found she couldn't let that happen. Her life, she had realized, is hers for the taking.

She is the mad, bad, beautiful Amy Pond and she loves Rory- just not yet. There is space to explore and adventures to have, places to go she has never dreamed of before and star whales to save, a whole lifetime to live for herself and herself alone. And there is Rory- and there will _always_ be Rory.

The Doctor gives her a gentle tug back inside the TARDIS, that itchy sleeve of his still pulling across her skin, and the universe's spell is broken- but there are no losses to be mourned here. She is Amy Pond and she will love her Rory, but for this moment, this second, the night that never happened, he will have to wait.


End file.
